Diana Hartel writes on public health and ecosystem health issues. She graduated from Columbia University with a doctorate in epidemiology and concentrations in environment-related chronic diseases and infectious diseases. She has held faculty positions at Columbia University and Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, and has published widely for biomedical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine. Additionally, she served at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, for three years, chairing inter-agency projects with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She created two non-profit organizations, Bronx Community Works in New York in 1993 and Madrona Arts in Oregon in 2006. Both organizations addressed issues of social and environmental issues. The Oregon-based Madrona Arts primarily employed visual and written arts to raise awareness of ecosystems and efforts to restore them to vibrant health.

[Photo by David Winston]

Diana will receive a four-week residency at PLAYA and a $1,000 cash prize.

We are also delighted to announce the prize finalists and semi-finalists:

Finalists

Crusoe, Can You Hear Me?: A novel by Deborah Tomkins

Lost Coast: A young-adult novel by Geneen Marie Haugen

Semi-finalists

Farm to Fable: The Fictions of Our Animal-Consuming Culture by Robert Grillo

An interesting opportunity for environmental writers and artists — the window is closing quickly…

We are inviting all members of the SAGE community to submit your stories, photographs, original artwork and more for inclusion in the upcoming 2018 Print Edition of SAGE Magazine. If you are interested submitting a piece for inclusion in the print edition, please fill out the form below with information about your story idea by Wednesday, January 31, 2018 at the latest. If your pitch is accepted, you’ll be invited to submit a final draft for our print edition released this spring.

I’ve long been a fan of Antennae, a literary/artistic journal created and curated by Giovanni Aloi.

So I was thrilled to see that the University of Minnesota Press is partnering with Giovanni and Caroline Piccard on a new book series titled Art after Nature.

Here’s their vision for the series:

Art after Nature maps new aesthetic territories defined by the humanities’ recent ontological turn. In the face of the unprecedented shifts in humanity’s conceived relationship with the natural world, modes of critical and political artistic engagement are adapting in response. As notions of pristine sublimity crumble, Art after Nature proposes to explore the consequences of this transition, further destabilizing anthropocentrism, and revealing the dark ecological fluidity of naturecultures. The urgency imposed by anthropogenic lenses of inquiry provides an ethical focus capable of applying productive pressure on practices and discourses alike. Within this framework, art theory, practice, and criticism become intersecting platforms upon which to map current philosophical waves. Books published in this series engage with the politics and contradictions of the Anthropocene as a concept in order to problematize recent and influential philosophical waves like animal studies, posthumanism, and speculative realism in relation to art writing and art making.